With Egypt’s Islamists scoring a crushing electoral victory over their secular opponents, governments and pundits alike are considering the likely denouement of the vaunted Arab Spring in the region’s largest country, Turkey. It is therefore worth noting some very troubling recent developments in the country that the Muslim Brotherhood and many in the West consistently tout as a successful “Islamist democracy” worth emulating.
On January 5, Turkish prosecutors arrested Gen. Ilker Basbug — the commander, until 2010, of the Turkish Armed Forces appointed by prime minister Recep Erdogan’s government — for allegedly plotting terrorist activities against the state. Basbug now faces the same predicament as 300 other military officers who have languished in jail for years on dubious charges of conspiracy to overthrow the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government, without a single conviction to date.
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